Home or Someplace Like It
by LdyAnne
Summary: Common Ground tag.


John couldn't get out of the infirmary fast enough. He couldn't stand the stares of his friends one more minute. He knew that they had witnessed most of the times he had been fed on. They had been forced to stand by helplessly while he'd been tied down and fed on by a wraith. But he couldn't stand them looking at him now like he was a ghost that had just returned from the dead. (Even though that was technically what had happened.)

Carson hadn't able to find anything in his preliminary tests that was cause for alarm, so, reluctantly, he let Sheppard go with the stipulation that he return the next morning for another check and more tests. John didn't argue with him. He just nodded and was out of the door before anyone could stop him.

He practically ran to the nearest transporter, his heart knocking in his chest. He was afraid someone was going to stop him and he needed to be alone, he needed to see what had happened to him. Sure he knew that he felt alright, better than alright, which was just plain freaky. But he needed to see. McKay's "he looks younger than he did before" just made him nervous. The way that his friends looked at him like he was going to shatter any moment made him afraid because it was the way he felt.

He didn't stop for any of the people who called to him in the hallways. He hated that everyone in the city knew what had happened to him. Heads turned as he passed, people called out to him in surprised greeting, but he didn't stop. He headed straight for his quarters and thought 'lock' at it as he heard the door slide shut behind him. Then, when he reached the door to his bathroom he just stopped, unable to go the next few steps necessary to confront his image in the mirror.

What if the wraith had changed him in some way? What if it wasn't really his face that looked back at him in the mirror? What if his friends had all been lying to him and he was still old and decrepit? All he'd been able to see of his transformation in the Genii cell had been his hands - they were aged hands – the skin papery and dry, the veins had stood out. They shook there at the end. Those hands scared him as bad as when they had been blue and scaly from Carson's retro-virus. All he could think of now was what if he looked in the mirror and his face looked like those hands?

With a shuddering exhale, John asked the door to open and stepped in before he could change his mind. As if Atlantis knew what he needed, the lights came up and John was facing his own reflection in the mirror.

What he saw made him suck in his breath. He didn't know what he'd been expecting, but it was anything but what he saw.

There was absolutely no sign or evidence of what had happened to him. His skin was smooth and unlined; his hair was its usual shade sticking up in unlikely tufts. His hand trembled as he smoothed it over his cheek. It was rough with stubble but no more aged than the day before.

It was wrong, just wrong.

He had almost died. As he laid there in the grass listening to the fight going on around him, he'd been certain he was going to die. After the Wraith had fed on him that last time before the Genii found them, John didn't even have strength enough to move more than a few feet before he fell into the grass and couldn't move again. He didn't know why the wraith hadn't finished him off. He attributed it to some weird sort of wraith torture. He expected the Wraith to return to gloat over his victory over the Genii before he finished taking John's life. He'd never expected to have his life returned to him. No one even knew it was possible. They knew it now though.

He just kept staring, trying to find some… sign of what he had endured. But there was nothing. His face looked exactly as it had the morning before and the morning before that. If anything, McKay was right and there were a few less lines around his eyes.

John pulled his shirt off over his head seeking the feeding scar that should be there. He could still feel the pain of the feeding, feel the life leaving him as the wraith sucked it from his body. It had hurt like nothing he had ever experienced in his life. He raked his fingers through the hair on his chest seeking some sign of his ordeal. There was no blood, no scar, nothing. It was tender, but that was all.

Suddenly John was exhausted, the adrenaline or the wraith enzyme or whatever had been keeping him on his feet flowing from his body. Wearily he leaned forward bracing himself on the sink with his arms and that's when he saw it. There was a bruise on his arm, right above the elbow. Already turning a spectacular shade of purple, it spread all the way up his arm, nearly to his shoulder. He thought about his time with the Genii and realized it must have happened during the escape. He'd hit the bars of his cell pretty hard a time or two.

Somehow the bruise made the whole thing real. He had almost died, fed upon by a wraith until he was nearly dead. He'd wanted death in those last few minutes, reached for it when his body was so old and decrepit that he couldn't even move. In those moments he'd hoped that his team would never find him like that, that they'd never see his old worn out husk of a body.

His fingers were trembling as they traced the bruise, pressing lightly to feel the pain; he needed to feel the pain to feel like something had actually happened to him. To know that he was actually alive, and not that ghost that his friends were seeing when they looked at him.

He was alive and he was home. It was slowly settling into him as his fingers pressed into the bruise, just feeling the warmth of his skin, his young skin.

His life had been given back to him by the wraith, and how messed up was that when a wraith was more honorable than many of the humans they had met in the Pegasus Galaxy? He hadn't really expected to ever see them again, it wasn't their fault. How could they know where John had been taken once the gate closed? But somehow they had found him, his team had come for him and now he was home. He'd never thought to have a home or a family and now he'd found both, almost by accident.

* * *

A/N: Written for the International "Where the heck did I get that bruise?" day. Much thanks to my wonderful beta chocolatephysicist. Any mistakes remaining are my own because, well, I fiddle.

Disclaimer: No, they're still not mine.


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